Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The implications for children and families of mothers working nonstandard shifts (i.e. working outside the hours of M-F 9-5) is increasingly well understood. The effects of nonstandard working hours are not distributed equally across families, but are particularly pronounced for low-income families. This may be because economic resource limitations place additional challenges on low-income workers with nonstandard working hours and their families. Unfortunately, very little research on nonstandard working hours focuses on the economic wellbeing of mothers who regularly work nonstandard hours. Our paper addresses this gap by providing a clearer picture of the economic wellbeing, broadly defined, of mothers working nonstandard schedules. We use the first five waves of the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) to examine the relationship between regularly working nonstandard schedules and markers of material hardship, subjective financial stress, and poverty among employed mothers. At each of the first 5 waves of MCS, we find higher prevalence of poverty among mothers regularly working nonstandard shifts compared with working a standard schedule. Mothers working a nonstandard shift are more likely to experience financial difficulty and making ends meet. At ages 3 and 5, nonstandard working hours are related to higher prevalence of being behind on debts and utilities. In early and middle childhood, regularly working nonstandard hours is related to overcrowding in the household compared with working standard hours only. Next steps are to examine types of nonstandard shifts and their relationship with economic wellbeing.